She took a pretty, furnished house in Eaton Place, and resumed the life which she had led when Cocky, like a ministering angel, had been behind her, to excuse her imprudence and share her extravagance. The Blenheims were left down at Whiteleaf, but Jack and his brothers and sister were brought to town.
Boo, wild with delight, raced upstairs to a bedroom on the third floor, and thought that altitude a seventh heaven. Jack was dull; he loved the country and hated London, hated it doubly now that he had lost Harry, and he felt sure that his mother was the cause of Harry’s disappearance. When he saw the Life Guards ride down through the Park to Knightsbridge, the sight made him very sad, for there were no kind dark eyes looking at him with a smile in them from under the shining helmet.
His mother, who was not harassed by such regrets, was very pleased to be in London again with a little money at her back. She was very tenacious of her social position, and she knew that it was necessary to be respectable now and then. She attended the first Drawing-room; went to the first receptions of some tiresome gros bonnets whom she called old dowdies; and reascended a social throne which for a moment had shaken under her. The Chapel Royal saw her every Sunday, and she began to think of making a pleasant second marriage before Katherine Massarene (who might spoil one) should return to society.
Harrenden House was shut up; its porter alone, stripped of his gorgeous vestments, dwelt behind the gates looking no more like himself than a grub looks like a butterfly. There was a hatchment above the door, large, imposing, majestic; it was there by Margaret Massarene’s wish beyond the usual time to have it shown. All the great people and the smart people who had dined at that house, and pocketed cotillon presents, and drunk rare wines, and borrowed money and paid it by insolent jokes, now drove past in the sunshine or the fog, in the north wind or the east, had found other dupes and other butts for their needs and their jests, and did not even give a thought to “Billy.”
He was gone, and there were always new people coming in from the States or the Colonies, or even homemade, who were the natural manure wherewith to nourish starving genealogical trees.
“I say, Sourisette, how was it you got nothing under Billy’s will?” said her cousin Roxhall to her one day as they rode in the Park.
“My dear Gerald,” she answered with dignity, “I had not sold him an ancestral estate. If I had done so I should not have taken it back as a gift from his daughter as you have done!”
“Oh I say,” muttered Roxhall. “That’s a nasty one, but it isn’t the fact. I’ve paid back half the purchase price and the other half is on the land, and it’s not you, Mousie, who have the right to say such things.”
Roxhall’s mind reverted to the sale of Vale Royal at Homburg, when he had never looked too closely into the percentage received by the fair negotiatress of the sale. They were speaking as they rode down Rotten Row, and at that moment her mare became fidgety and carried her out of earshot. He rode after her.
“You think you can say those things to me,” he said, leaning a little toward her, “because I am a relative, and because I have always been a fool about you; but don’t you put people’s backs up like that, my dear, or you’ll get more than you like some day.”